Thursday, June 14, 2007

Outlook 2007 is not responding in Vista

Yesterday, my windows update pick up a lot of updates to be performed to my Vista machine. Being the good MS citizen, I say yes, go ahead. After the reboot (of course there is a reboot.!) my Outlook 2007 keep freezing up on me.



Looking through all of the updates, I've found that one of the updates was the
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/933493, which tries to fix some of the performance issues in outlook 2007.

This update is related to this other KB article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/932086/ that states that the size of the PST file might affect performance... hummm...



My outlook.pst file is 131MB. Googling around found a couple of post that directed me to rename some files from the upgrade/import from Outlook 2003 to 2007.

Shut down Outlook 2007, then I renamed the following files:
"C:\Users\awing\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook\extend.dat" [to extend.old]
"C:\Users\awing\AppData\Local\Microsoft\FORMS\FRMCACHE.dat" [to frmCache.old]
Open Outlook 2007 back, and now it seems to be working fine again. I have not experienced any more Not Responding hang ups.

oh well.

16 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks! That problem was driving me crazy, and you saved my sanity with your simple (though incomprehensible) solution.

Arnulfo Wing said...

you are very welcome.I love Outlook 2007 but I hate its performance.

Anonymous said...

Thank you, this solved my problem, too.

Anonymous said...

same problem, but this hint didnt solve it... ill google around a bit more. thanks anyway

Anonymous said...

Thank you for your post. I was hoping it would help but no luck. Does anyone have another solution? I looked on MS site but didn't find anything.

Arnulfo Wing said...

sorry, my post did not help. Outlook messages are very hard to comprehend, and there might be another solution to your problem. Please keep me update if you resolved it, thanks,

Mikael said...

Worked for me, sort of!

Before this fix outlook would go "not responding" (for quit a long time, maybe 8 seconds) almost every time I hit the delete button deleting some junk mail.

Now it actually does the same, but the "not responding" time is only 1-2 seconds. Maybe it's quite OK with 1 GB .ost.

Arnulfo Wing said...

glad I could partially help. Wish I could figure out exactly the issue that slow down the synch...

Anonymous said...

Saved me. Thanks.

Anonymous said...

God Bless you! This has been bugging me for months. Although I had a little trouble finding those files, it seems to be working!

Alex said...

All in all to my mind there is only one tool for work with outlook files and recovery it too-fix exchange pst,applcation helped me not once,also utility can restore either your mailbox or the whole system in minutes,can easily repair your mailbox, no need to waste your time and prepare backup copies, that should be updated regularly,analyze your mailbox for errors and extract all emails, contacts and attachments, if necessary,works with all supported versions of Microsoft Windows operating system and Microsoft Outlook email client,will display it automatically, when this Outlook pst fix program is launched, it happens, when current user has only one default profile,can help you to find all files with *.ost and *.pst formats, that are located on your HDD,extract separate files, that can be opened even without email client, this tool supports *.eml, *.txt and *.vcf formats.

Anonymous said...

My Hero!!!

Arnulfo Wing said...

;) you are welcome.

Sher Khan said...

OMG.. this actually fix my problem!!!!

i've been having this issues for like soooo looonggg.. been deleting my email to reduce the .pst file.. but still it hangs on me.. (with the 'not responding' message.

BUT.. when i did this simple rename. It just works!.. no more slowness.. everything came back to normal....

THANKS!!!!!

Alexis said...

In my coolection of software there are a lot of tools.But one tool helped me very good-dbx files repair.Some mails were corrupted and it recover their.Moreover tool made it without payment and showed me how recovers information from *.dbx files up to 4GB in size..

Anonymous said...

Woo hoo!!

Your fix worked for me! It was driving me NUTS that ever since the most recent Vista update I downloaded (not that long ago)that my Outlook (office 2007) has been performing SO slowly and contstantly hanging. I have wasted way too much time waiting for messages to load whilst I have been shouting at my poor laptop! I have also spent literally hours trying to find a solution on the MS websites to no avail :(

Me too, it took me rather a long time to find the files to fix. For those of you reading this first time can I suggest you do an advanced search to find them.

Once I had changed the file extensions (go figure) and I opened Outlook a program called Xobni (a really useful Outlook utility) reinstalled (another casualty of the most recent update). Sad muppet I am, I really missed it so was really happy that your fix sorted that problem too!

The only outstanding glitch I am unable to fix is that I cannot attach the Outlook icon to my quick launch bar - if I right click on the icon in my start menu, I get an error message saying that Explorer is not responding. I can live with launching it from the start menu but it would be nice to fix that one too - any ideas?